Did the ten plagues really happen? Was Moses an Egyptian cult member? And how
did he part the Red Sea?

Exodus is far bigger than a battle or a geographical migration. The book that recounts it establishes a foundational myth for the Jewish and the Christian religions. Myths don’t come with much bigger import than those in Exodus. Three great events stand out: the revelation to Moses at the Burning Bush of God’s name (“I AM” as the English Bible has it); the initiation of the Passover feast (which has as its antitype the events culminating in the Christian Easter); and the handing down of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai.

The Book of Exodus starts with slavery in Egypt and points to the promised land of milk and honey in Canaan. But Moses, its reluctant hero, does not make it. “Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is over against Jericho,” says the book of Deuteronomy. Within sight of the land beyond the Jordan he died. “And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.”

To follow in the footsteps of Moses, and see the sun rise over the desert as he saw it, sounds a stirring experience. Ridley Scott’s film Exodus: Gods and Kingsmust make lots more people wonder whether they can find out exactly where those footsteps were planted. What evidence is there of the events of the biblical book of Exodus?

The Egyptians left no written record of the Exodus. That might seem odd if the Israelites numbered 600,000, as the Book of Exodus says. But it is obvious that numbers are not used literally in the old parts of the Bible. Forty days and 40 nights (the time Moses spent on Mount Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments) need not mean six or seven weeks. And so it goes for other round numbers.

If it’s archaeological evidence you look for, what would count? No one is expecting a scrapyard of Egyptian chariots suddenly to be unearthed form the sands of the Red Sea shore. And would Israelite remains look any different from other, Canaanite remains? Egypt had experienced earlier incursions by Canaanites, the so-called Hyksos, who in the 17th century BC founded their own dynasty of kings, ruling from the eastern Nile Delta where the Israelites were later to dwell.

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But Exodus does mention the city of Ramses. “Since this was named after Pharaoh Ramses II,” says Dr Adrian Curtis, the doyen of biblical cartographers, “those who have sought a historical context for these events have suggested that Ramses II was the pharaoh of the oppression.”

The temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel, Egypt (EPA)

It was for his new city of Pi-Ramses, to which the pharaoh had moved headquarters from Thebes, that the Israelites, then, were obliged to make bricks without straw, as the Bible says. And bricks remain, with and without straw.

Ramses II lived through most of the 13th century BC. But some academics place the presence of the descendants of the 12 sons of Jacob (who was also named Israel) earlier in that millennium, insisting that the placename Ramses has been substituted in the text for an older name; some argue for a date hundreds of years later. Some say it is all made up.

The world of archaeology grew very excited in the 1880s when the great explorer Flinders Petrie and 200 workmen dug up monumental remains from Pi-Ramses at Tanis in the Nile Delta. Tanis figures in the Steven Spielberg film Raiders of the Lost Ark, about which, from a historical point of view, the less said the better. But 20th-century archaeology made it plain that the grand remains at Tanis had been brought from elsewhere in ancient times. The true location of Pi-Ramses was then put at Qantir, 20 miles to the south. This could be the starting point for Exodus if the Israelites had been set to work on Ramses II’s construction work.

It is undeniable that the Israelites are defined in the Bible by not being Egyptian. Take cats. There are no cats in the Bible. The Egyptians, by contrast, mentioned them constantly, mummified them and included them in their flexible pantheon. Actually, there is one mention, just one, of a cat in the Scriptures, but only in the Book of Baruch, which is not included in the Hebrew Bible, only in the Greek-language Septuagint. It comes in a passage about idols, which allow every sort of foul creature to creep over them, for they are no gods but senseless blocks: “Bats, swallows, and birds alight on their bodies and heads; and so do cats.”

So it is striking that Moses has an Egyptian name, having been discovered among the bulrushes by the pharaoh’s daughter. The fact of his naming so took possession of the imagination of Sigmund Freud that, in his book Moses and Monotheism, he insisted that Moses was not a member of the Hebrew tribes at all, but an Egyptian follower of Akhnaten, the eccentric monotheistic pharaoh of the dynasty before Ramses II’s. In Freud’s retelling of history, the followers of Moses turned on him and killed him, later resorting to the volcano-god Jahweh, for ever after dogged by guilt at doing Moses to death. While there are elements of plausibility in this, it makes the Book of Exodus look tamely factual by comparison.

Others are convinced, as EF Sutcliffe, a contributor to the Cambridge History of the Bible, argued half a century ago, that Hebrews would not have invented a long and intimate association between Moses their deliverer and the Egyptians, their oppressors. Moses’s upbringing in the Egyptian court had to be based on fact.

Joel Edgerton as Ramses II and Christian Bale as Moses in 'Exodus: Gods and Kings'

What then of the plagues that assailed Egypt when Pharaoh would not let the Israelites go – the river of blood, the frogs and flies and murrain, hail and darkness and locusts? They take up five whole chapters of Exodus. It is not that they are presented as a means of persuading Pharaoh to free the people of Israel. On the contrary, God tells Moses that the heart of Pharaoh will be hardened, in order to show that the power of God alone sets the Israelites free.

Some scientists grew very excited four or five years ago, announcing that the plagues could be explained by a climatic hiccup at the end of the reign of Ramses II, in the late 13th century BC. Professor Augusto Mangini, a paleoclimatologist at Heidelberg University, said that stalagmites in Egyptian caves indicated a sudden dry period, which would have made the Nile sluggish. Dr Stephan Pflugmacher, a biologist at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology in Berlin, suggested that “all the waters that were in the river were turned to blood” because of an alga named Oscillatoria rubescens.

At the same time, Nadine von Blohm, from the Institute for Atmospheric Physics in Germany, said that the plagues of hail and darkness over the land could have been caused by the explosive eruption of Santorini, in the Mediterranean. This took place, though, three or four centuries earlier than the death of Ramses II.

A scientific explanation is often put forward as an alternative to the biblical account of an act of God. But this is clearly not the way the author of Exodus thought. For him, hail naturally flattened barley, but God was in charge of the whole affair.

Re-reading the Book of Exodus must leave anyone with the impression that the way filmmakers look on the story of the Israelites scarcely coincides with the focus of the biblical narrator. The amount of text given over to the construction of the tabernacle (the portable tent to contain the tablets of stone on which the Commandments were written) far exceeds the bare account of the parting of the Red Sea. Filmmakers have tended to think the walls of water in the Red Sea their big moment, yet it has often come across lamentably. In thetelevision series The Bibleproduced by Roma Downey and Mark Burnett last year, for example, the Red Sea parted in swirly computer-generated curtains as the Israelites plodded across the seabed with a good deal of shouting.

So how might they have done it in reality? According to Barbara J Sivertsen (in a book published by Princeton in 2009), a tsunami from the eruption of the Aegean volcanic island of Yali drowned the pursuing Egyptians. Somehow, such recruiting of extraordinary natural phenomena feels less convincing than the unvarnished narrative of the Book of Exodus: “The Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land.”

The place that the Israelites might have crossed would, so the Oxford Bible Atlas suggests, be among the Bitter Lakes, north of the Gulf of Suez. The Hebrew words for the sea that they crossed is yam suph, we are told, signifying Sea of Reeds. That does not suggest deep waters that reared up like the sides of multi-storey car parks. A significant element of the undoing of Pharaoh’s pursuing army is that they were using chariots pulled by fast warhorses – both typically nasty Egyptian bits of behaviour, in the eyes of the biblical narrator. “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses,” sang the Psalmist years later, “but we will remember the name of the Lord our God.” Even before the water rose again with the change of wind, the Egyptians’ chariot wheels were fatally clogged.

Once the Israelites were clear of the sea and the Egyptian pursuers, did they turn right, wandering southwards, deep into the Sinai peninsula? If Mount Sinai was the mountain now called Jabal Musa (Mount Moses, 7,497ft high) they would have had to follow a circuitous route. They were, it is true, supposed to be 40 years in their wanderings, but the most Exodus says it that they did not take “the way of the land of the Philistines”, which would be the route directly east along the Mediterranean coast.

Some insist that Mount Sinai is the 8,000ft Mount Lawz in modern Saudi Arabia (which would have entailed a hop over the wide Gulf of Aqaba). In 2007 Robert Cornuke, an amateur archaeologist, said that he’d found a stone inscription there with the name Yahweh on it. The internet is still hot with indignant refutations and equally indignant affirmations of the claim. Others place Mount Sinai far north of Mount Lawz, near Petra in present-day Jordan. Once authors get hold of such a hypothesis, they will not let go of the bone. The more you pull at it, the tighter they hold on.

A less unlikely location for Mount Sinai is Jebel Halal, in northern Sinai, on an inland route west-east towards the land of Canaan. It is no place for pilgrims just at the moment. The Foreign Office advises against all travel to North Sinai, where “terrorists and criminals seek to prevent the Egyptian authorities from exercising control”.

The multiplicity of candidates for Mount Sinai does not logically imply that it never existed. There is just no way of telling where it was. A parallel in much more recent times is the site of a great victory for the English under King Athelstan against a combined army of Vikings and Scots. We know the year of that battle, 937AD. The battlefield was called Brunanburh. But where was it? Some say in the Wirral peninsula, west of Liverpool. Others say next to Lanchester in County Durham. Archaeology has been unable to help. If such an important battle in England only 1100 years ago cannot be pinned down, what hope for the wanderings of a nomadic people more than two millennia earlier? In 40 years, even figurative ones, they could have wandered far, but their footprints have blown away in the wind and their traces are left only on the page, and now, reimagined on the screen.